ON SHIFTING GEARS, LETTING THINGS STEEP, AND HAVING SOMETHING TO LOOK FORWARD TO
Friday January 15 2021
Dear Sarah,
Happy Friday night! My brain is noodly after a long week and a long day and I found myself musing around the internet, looking at cold-weather running pants (I’m working on building out my winter kit more thoroughly) and contemplating shiny new phones to replace my five-plus-year-old phone. Clicking around in shopping mode with a tired brain is easier than getting into writing mode! (That’s how the big They get us! It’s just so easy to keep clicking… and clicking…) But I’ve completed a particularly restorative round of Yoga with Adriene and I’ve eaten a big bowl of Friday-night spaghetti and I’m pleased to be here on the page with you!
Midweek I jotted some notes for my letter to you: Tired from this week. Perhaps I was on the computer too late last night. (Confession: I was.) My fingers stumbling a bit over the keyboard. I find myself tired from the slip straight back into busy work days, figuring out how to manage time and shift gears when people are variously seeking my time, wanting things now.
Earlier, as the week began, I had the feeling that transitioning from one state to another — from my time, the weekend, to work time — is becoming more difficult. Is this a new year or a new me? Perhaps this is just because the year is young, and soon I will be jaded and fully back into work mode. It felt a bit like a sci-fi idea, myself as a character toying with moves through space-time, jumping between past and future, but the energy required to change states and times is unsustainable, and a choice is required: one or the other; constant change and movement not an option. With a slow entry into the work week, Monday dissolved through my fingers, and Tuesday lagged along but had improved a bit by the day’s end.
I’ve signed up for a woodblock printmaking class for February and I am very excited to experiment with a new way of printing, a new way of getting ink onto a page, making ephemera to send out into the world. (I also signed up for a virtual bowl power carving demo! I am very curious to learn about making a bowl without using a lathe — and I am also looking forward to a time when I can get into more bowl-turning on a lathe as well.) It’s been a while since I took a class. I woke up on Wednesday of this week after a good night’s sleep, felt clear-headed, and signed up for the classes on the spot, as soon as I opened my email. As you and I discussed over text, it’s important to have something to look forward to! I love pages, love print on pages, the tactility and beauty of color, black ink, metallics, pages that reflect light and pages that draw the light in. I’m excited to learn how I’ll carve a design into wood and print as many cards as I can!
These couple of weeks at the start of January always feel long, and perhaps longer than ever this year, this first year we’re starting fresh with the pandemic in our lives. In January suddenly everyone’s trying to get a jump on the rest of this month, the next month, the spring, and even looking out at the middle of the year. With some project planning already looking out past February into March, April, and May, I’m thinking again about seasonality. (On the subject of the seasons: winter-spring could be known round these parts as busy season!) And thinking about the actual seasons of the midwest, I’m also planning to leaf through my seed catalogs this weekend with an eye on placing some orders. Last year on my birthday in April we started sprouting our seeds — plenty of time before then to daydream about plots and planters and spring things growing in the house and yard! So many tomato varieties from which to choose a delicious few!
As the days begin to lengthen ever so slightly and we think on sprouting new seeds, I’m very curious to hear more about your thoughts from your letter last week on experimenting with shorter, intensive bursts. You were reflecting on the various ways we’ve cultivated pacing small amounts of dedicated energy, spread out over a long period of time. I wonder if your suggestion is getting at the idea of… starting and finishing something in a shorter span of time? Gasp! (Kidding!) I’ll acknowledge that we’ve sustained a fair amount of ongoingness in our exchange here — what might our intensive bursts look like? Can we handle intensive bursts this January? (Maybe in February?) I realize what a treat it has been to maintain this ongoing and contemplative writing practice with you these last two-plus years, through a particularly trying time in this country, on many fronts. I think and hope we are emerging into a time when the idea of experimenting with intensive bursts will sound right up our alley! I want to hear more about what you imagined when you wrote those words!
As the conceptual sun sets on this week (the real sun set ages ago) I’m planning to start some dough for a yeast bread tomorrow, to bake on Sunday; after our pan pizza experiment last Friday I’m designating myself the yeast-breads baker in the house and am going to work on expanding my craft! I hope you’ve enjoyed a cozy pizza and movie night and I’m looking forward to relaxing with your words! Happy weekend, my friend!
Until soon,
Eva
January 15, 2020
Dear Eva,
Repeating your experience last week, it is just before 9 PM and I am sitting down finally to start my letter. Typically at this hour on this day of the week, I would pour myself a pint of some tasty beer. At this moment, I’m dreaming of a Founder’s Breakfast Stout with its bourbony, caramel flavors. But alas, it is [still!] Dry January, barely the halfway point thereof, in fact. To my horror, I realized this week that this particular month includes five full weekends. What a month for an arbitrary adventure with sobriety!
I appreciated your point last week about each new day being a chance to establish a new pattern. A day is a stretch of time like any other, it is true. I can understand that rationally and yet I can’t truly buy it in my gut. There seems to be something about chunking time in one-day increments that my habit-forming/sustaining brain just will not do. At least one month or it doesn’t count, I say. My unfortunate recent pattern of walking briskly around the house just before bed to get my 5 mile daily goal is evidence of the lengths I will go to to hold a month-long streak. Note that I am not defending this silliness, just describing it.
This week I spent one evening reading through our past letters searching for excerpts from our letters about our letters. It was a surprisingly emotional experience, like watching bits of my life flash before my eyes. I marveled as I read through our correspondence over the past 2+ years; we really are making something. Something for our individual selves, as well as for us.
I noticed as I read things I had written that might as well have been written by a stranger that I seem to have a sort of everyday amnesia, or perhaps the inverse of the phenomenon that leads us all to not remember ever being wrong—I can never remember being right! I have thoughts, I write about them, and then I am onto the next thing so quickly that they nearly evaporate. I wonder if this ties back to my tendency that we have discussed recently, where I rush to the new clean version like a moth to the light? It is as if I am always running to the next thing I might learn, do, or create, not just letting what I have done already be enough. This is illuminating. I need to learn to let things steep. Well, tomorrow is a new day, as you say!
I will note that I remain ambivalent about the publicness of our exchange. Somehow, I find that the public aspect of these letters only dwindles in importance for me as time goes by. Maybe that is because I grow ever more certain about my purpose and motivation for this project with every passing week. At the start, I think I felt like we were embarking on something that we were not sure how to describe, or where it would lead, or exactly who we were doing it for, or why. Did I want to become a professional writer? Did we want to build an audience? Should I write in a “public voice” or the way I would write my friend Eva in a private exchange? Now, I have clarity—I write to you, for us, and for me.
It is now nearing 10 PM and I see your letter calling for me in my inbox. The temptation to take a peek is too great, so I will bring this to a close. Enjoy a luxurious three day weekend ahead, my friend!
Yours,
Sarah